


Take Me Home

by WhumpTown



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Aaron Hotchner Needs a Hug, Aaron Hotchner Whump, Child Abuse, Gen, He was abused as a child, Hurt Aaron Hotchner, Introspection, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29856318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhumpTown/pseuds/WhumpTown
Summary: Aaron Hotchner and the woods
Relationships: The BAU Team & Aaron Hotchner
Kudos: 19





	Take Me Home

Aaron Hotchner always thought nature was the stronger virtue, though he does like John Locke’s theory of the blank slate. It feels calming but naïve to believe in. If asked, he would state his firm belief that any child, no matter the genetics passed to them by their parents, has a fair chance at being a good, kind human being. Mostly, because he needs to believe that. If not for his own sanity then to assure himself that whatever parts of his own father he cannot simply contain with temperament, then for the son he might have damned along the way.

He may not like his own nature but true nature -- the breeze of ten p.m. on a warm October night and the goosebump-inducing chill that comes with the realization something deep, something dark is watching -- Aaron Hotchner loves nature.

The crunch of the leaves beneath his feet is alluring, welcoming like what he imagines other people feel when they see their mother’s waving from worn down front porches or the sight of their father’s just far enough away in the burning glow of the setting sun that your eyes burn watching. This is his home, the depths of the woods in September when it’s warm enough to shed coats behind so long as no one catches sight of your bare arms. Mothers, never his own, always scolding that fateful pneumonia because their own mothers used to shout about it and they fear what their own mother’s feared; that their child might answer nature’s promising call and slip off without a trace. Returning to the ground as bones, a temporal plate to be found like an old tire discarded in the trees.

To be found by men like Aaron. He’d spent many nights out like this afternoon here, wishing for something to take him far away.

Faintly, through the rustle of the others, he can hear the disturbance of a fast-paced creak. He smiles just thinking about it, glancing quickly to his left to make sure no one’s caught his loose expression. No one pays him any mind, they rarely do. Glancing once over his shoulder as he steps off the path, just waiting to be redirected by one of the deputies, he follows the sound. It’s not far, he looks for the rocks, and though he should fear getting lost he knows his dark suit calls more attention to him than it should.

It makes him look harsh, the suit, and he likes that. People look at him the way they look at the mouth of the woods; afraid. As a child, he learned that only certain people didn’t fear the trees and the silence. The people with worse things to fear tear through it, kicking up leaves and shouting into the silence. Take me. Take me. Take me. He wished the same. To be consumed whole and wash these bruises away. For a long time, he thought of the woods weren’t answering him back. They do, they always answer just different than expected.

His father never found him in the woods.

Every safe heaven Aaron ever had was found out. The old shed in their backyard burned down after he was found curled up on grease rags from old abandoned projects. Being pulled from the neighbor’s shrubs left scratches so deep he still has scars on his legs. The November of his twelfth birthday he crawled behind a dryer in the shed of an old lady three houses down from his own and when his father found him he took a fire poker and pressed it, red and angry from the flames it sat in, against his ribs. Asked him how cold he was now. He still has the scar but tells people he got it while drunk at some frat party, that he has no idea what did it.

The woods never took him like they took other boys but they protected him. Their silence. Their warmth.

Now he can understand that woods are not as safe as he always told himself they were. The boys that get taken, the boys and the girls that are always so young, are not consumed by the woods as he’d thought. They are taken by evil men and things that would have happened to him if he were taken would have made him wish he were back in his woods. How foolish, how hopefully blind children are. Searching for the good in everything even when they have no idea what it looks like.

He finds the creek but it’s much smaller than he’d been expecting. A weak trickle. Tugging the knees of his dress pants up he squats down, easing the tips of his fingers into the freezing cold. It’s sharp, tangible pain that he’s familiar with. The ache of the water, clear even though it runs so thinly here, a clear testament to winter’s approach. It won’t be long before the leaves beneath his feet decay.

“Aaron?”

The first time he saw a dead body he was nine-years-old. The boy they found was two years younger than him, mean and loud on multiple occasions the biggest torment a child then could come across. Now he can understand that the other boy’s anger, his uncontrollable fits of intangible rage, were his only way of communicating the confusion and the pain of what was happening to him.

As Aaron stood and watched them pull that boy’s body out of the river, he understood enough. They said he was abused and Aaron could grasp that -- not abuse like his own so the application of the word made actual sense to him. He knew there were things that people should not do to one another. He did not understand what his father did to him also counted. He would not for many more years to come. There comes a point, one he reached a long time ago when there isn’t even a point in asking the crumpled flowers if he loves me or if he loves me not.

Today he will feel Derek’s eyes watching his every move. Feel the hand Emily carefully places on his elbow when he grows lost to his thoughts, unable to explain his leaps in the profile without exposing himself. Dave will push weak coffee into him and force him to take a long lunch, which he will return from thirty minutes before everyone else having eaten nothing but pouring more coffee regardless. Spencer and Penelope will avoid him and JJ will avert her eyes for fear of what she’ll find if she looks too long.

And he will fall into the cheaply made hotel bed without having showered or discarded his dirty clothes, his belt still wrapped around his hips. Close his eyes and call for the woods as he had as a child, for the escape. To get away from the suffering that he has found to be lacking meaning only deep, ever-present agony. It’s taught him nothing. No perception. No art. It is the weight that he carries, a burden bestowed upon him from parent to child. The only wealth he ever inherited are the scars he can never wash away.

Nature vs. Nurture. Did he ever have a choice at all?


End file.
